Tools
Gig platforms underreport your mileage. If you aren't tracking your own miles from the moment you leave your driveway, you are overpaying the IRS.
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Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash typically only track your "active" miles—the distance from pickup to drop-off. They completely ignore the miles you drive while waiting for a ping, or the miles you drive back to a hotspot after a remote drop-off.
The IRS allows you to deduct miles as long as you are actively engaged in your business. This means the moment you turn the driver app ON, your business miles start. If you drive to a busy downtown area to wait for orders, those commute miles are fully deductible.
Keeping a pen-and-paper logbook is exhausting. Use an automatic GPS tracking app like Gridwise, Stride, or Everlance. These apps run in the background on your phone and log every drive. At the end of the day, you simply swipe right for business trips and left for personal trips.
If you pay for a premium subscription to a mileage tracking app to get automated reports and cloud backup, that subscription fee is 100% tax-deductible as a business expense on your Schedule C.